Barking mad
£18 sticks, and the other signs your area has hit peak gentrification
Afew days ago, in a fragrant act of work avoidance, I dropped into a new florist’s shop on my high street. There, among the buckets of roses and cherry blossom, tucked away on shelves filled with trailing ferns, juicy succulents, and a cache of vintage milk bottles, was a heap of sticks, priced from £12 to £18.
These were not magic sticks. They weren’t ancient relics of an enchanted woodland grove. They were just sticks. The kind of thing your dog or your child might pick up on a walk, say, in the large Victorian park that lies only a few hundred metres from that very site.
But this is Stoke Newington in north London (or, as my friend Fi now calls it, Stick Newington), where anything is possible, including people walking their pet stoats or pigs on leads through the park and kids commuting to school on omnicycles.
This isn’t a new thing. In the Eighties, comedian Alexei Sayle joked about this being a place where people grew their own denim and knitted their own yogurt, a place where one Sunday, the houses fell down as gentrifying residents all chose the same weekend to knock their front and back rooms into one.
So the £12 sticks fit well with the ludicrousness of quite how gentrified this area has become. I thought my neighbours might enjoy the “You’ll never guess what now” moment of the sticks, so I took a quick photograph and tweeted it. And then it all went a bit (more) nuts. Jeremy Vine retweeted it and it went viral. There was clamour to interview me and the shop owner to find out what on earth was so special about these sticks that they could get away with selling them to locals for over a tenner.
It turns out the sticks are actually hooks, made from sustainably gathered wood by local craftsmen. All the better for you to hang up your vintage peasant smock in your bothy in trendy east London. You see, after the sticks-not-wands, I’m calling “House!” on this game of gentrification bingo (though obviously that hasn’t been played in these parts for years). Here are the other signs the area you live in has hit Peak Gentrification.
Baby on board Massive buggies are so over as a way of transporting your little darlings (who, by the way, are no longer called Tarquin and Isolde, but Reg and Olive, much to the embarrassment of their grandparents). These days it’s all about the cargo bike. You can easily get R& O, a week’s shop and that second-hand spinning wheel you found on Freecycle in your Babboe Curve. More active families favour a Thule Chariot Chinook. The local bike repair shop can knock you up a decent macchiato while you wait.
Everything’s a pop-up Point 1 is just as well, as there are no petrol stations for 20 miles. They have become all pop-up restaurant spaces. Drop by on Friday night for tacos and cocktails from a van – so much greener, yeah?
Shopping has gone nuts You can buy a yurt more easily that you can a spanner or a bag of nails. I once got very excited when a place called Haberdashery opened on my high street. It turned out to be a café, not somewhere to buy needles and thread. Silly old me. Knitting happens You know when you used to go into a boozer and there were old men in the corner playing dominos? They have now been replaced by knitters (I have to confess some culpability here. For a while I used to join a group called Stoke Knittington to do just that. Sorry for ruining pubs, everyone.) Knitting’s paramilitary wing is known as guerrilla knitting, or yarn bombing. If suddenly trees, bridges, benches and lampposts in your neighbourhood
start to acquire cute knitwear, you know they’ve arrived. You have now reached peak gentrification.
Names get ridiculous They used to be called areas, but now everywhere is a Quarter or a District, often of entirely made-up provenance. Near me, a Forties shoe factory of no architectural merit, which overlooks a car park, is suddenly The Cotton Exchange. If you needed further evidence that London’s property developers hate us, South and North Tottenham are now SoTo and NoTo, and Colliers Wood is Collywood. No one knows what we have done to deserve this.
Dogs are king Everyone has a dog, and that dog is probably more welcome in local cafés and restaurants than kids. Places that sniff at the idea of a children’s menu gleefully proclaim they have four different kinds of organic biscuits for Fido over there. (“On the house! Of course we don’t mind if he sits on the banquette!”)
Food is very serious Very. An artisanal butcher’s selling locally sourced charcuterie sits next to a vegan wellness centre. Local teenagers no longer have paper rounds. Instead, they run businesses where they’ll pop in and feed your sourdough starter while you’re on holiday.
Fonts matter You know you area is on the up when everything needs to look as if it has been written on a chalkboard. Capital letters are approached with extreme caution. Three of the most right-for-now fonts are genuinely called Gin, Distillery and Microbrew. They hint at another reason your children will never be able to afford to leave home. Forget gentrification, it’s now all about gintrification. If there’s no one in your street creating posh spirits with botanicals foraged from a local park, there soon will be.